Personally, in my thirties, I don't believe most people are rational in any consistent way. I think people that are perceived as rational tend to have good filtering and pushback mechanisms available to them, which also entails cultivating a friend-group that will provide those things without judgement and elevate you for the outcomes rather than the minutiae in between.
Pretty much everywhere IN THE PRESENT. When reading this statement, people will immediately come to mind with several canonical examples. What's funny is, those examples will almost invariably be targeted at the political opposition in a way that's almost diametrically opposed.
People, throughout history and the present, share some things in common: a strong affinity for contempt over other groups of people leading them to all manner of false belief and irrationality, and a certainty over their own correctness.
And in saying that... Here I am, expressing contempt over some poorly defined group of people with some hint of a suggestion that I am immune.
Funny, also in my thirties, I view almost-everyone as almost-always rational. The issue is instead in the analysis, which leaves out externalities or associated risks that the "specification of rationality" doesn't take into account. I've really never encountered a person who made an irrational decision, just one where I didn't fully understand the total calculus going on in their head.
almost out of my thirties, consider myself perpetually interested in chasing and studying rationality for the last 25 years or so, and consider most of the population certifiably insane and I'm an alien anthropologist ferrying between mental institutions.
It's not all bad though, on a lot of the empirical economic work I've done a lot of people appear what I'd call "weakly locally rational": a rationality effect seems to effect people in aggregate and determines the direction they move, and tends to be the biggest effect, though the aggregate doesn't move perfectly in accordance with what rationality would expect. It also depends very much on framing: they are "locally majority rational" in the context of their frame of reference, but not in terms of the macro-world: which makes sense, because we're finite creatures who can't actually take in all the information, have limited processing ability, and each have different access to information and historical experiences. so most of us do the best with the limited experience of what we got and how we understand the world.
